Local Online Marketing Trends That Can Help Your Company Get Ahead

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local-businessToday’s local business owners are expected to know more than how to run a business. Without quality marketing, even a great business can get lost in the noise of their louder and more visible competition. Local business owners now have to understand the very basics of marketing, at the absolute least, or they have to find someone that does. However, marketing is anything but stable and new trends are constantly rising and receding, especially when it comes to online marketing.

This could be why so many local business owners refuse to finally claim their spot online, but studies have made it increasingly obvious that abstaining from online marketing hurts businesses in an increasingly connected world. Without SEO, PPC, social media, mobile optimization, and customer relationship platforms, there is little way for your business to make itself known, even with word of mouth to support it.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly true that users who can’t find your business online are more likely to move on than they are to continue their search in more traditional offline locations. If you’re a local business owner trying to nail down your portion of the market, you will need to be equipped with the basics for online marketing, but you’ll also have to keep up with the marketing trends that will decide your effectiveness.

Court Cunningham covered the three most important trends in local online marketing of the year. It is telling that Cunningham published her article in February, and each of the trends has only grown since then. More importantly, it seems none of the trends show any sign of slowing down. Cunningham’s advice can help you get ahead of your competition, and turn your modest online marketing strategies into powerhouse tools for success.

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5 Ways Your Business Could Benefit From Hiring an Online Marketing Company

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Online MarketingSmall businesses are constantly tasked with making the most of the limited resources they have. If you are handling your online marketing within your company, chances are you are putting a significant amount of resources towards your marketing. While marketing obviously costs money, it also costs time and effort from workers and you likely aren’t getting the results you really want from your efforts.

Hiring an outside firm to take the reins on your online marketing may feel like giving away control of a vital part of your business, but it is more like hiring a driver who will take you where you would like to go while you are able to take care of your own business. If you are concerned about the prospect of enlisting an outside agency to handle or assist with your marketing, you might consider all the following ways hired marketing services can help your brand.

1) Save Time for Everyone

No matter the size of your team, allowing an outside party to take over marketing frees up time which can be better devoted to your own service. You will no longer have to invest the hours on writing marketing material, engaging your consumers on social media, or creating and managing all your email lists. With those tasks taken care of, your team can use their skills where they are really needed.

2) Gain an Outside Perspective

It is impossible for a business owner to ever distance themselves far from their business. The love of the industry, hard-earned skills, and personal investment in success all drive successful businesses, but they can also obscure your ability to see what exactly attracts your customers. Your perspective on the parts of your business that are most attractive will automatically be biased, so it can be important to have a set of extra eyes to give a professional and non-biased opinion. Marketing professionals understand consumer behaviors and how to attract and convert interested visitors, and they can use that knowledge to come up with unique angles you may not notice alone.

3) Leverage Built-In Expertise

If you are small enough to not have an actual marketing department, but you are still asking someone in your company to handle the online marketing, chances are they have other responsibilities. It is common for business owners to try to handle the marketing while they balance a million other responsibilities, or to have several team members who also work as customer service reps, salespeople, bookkeepers, or human resources. Hiring a third-party allows these members of your team (or yourself) to put their skills where they are most valuable, and you gain more professional and focused marketing in return.

4) Access to Specialized Technology

Your company likely uses a few platforms and technologies for various functions, including online marketing. But, how many marketing-specific programs do you use? Most likely, the answer is few to none. But, professional marketing services partner you with professionals who are well-versed with the latest technology designed specifically to improve the impact of marketing. Best of all, you won’t have to invest thousands of dollars in analytics and automation programs.

5) Do More With Less

One of the biggest drawbacks of handling your own marketing is a loss of efficiency. In-house marketing usually focuses on a few channels, but it also tends to miss other channels with huge potential for your business. It simply is impossible to handle maintaining a website while managing a PPC campaign, running several social media accounts, and trying to create insightful and useful blog content. You will either end up with low-quality output, an overwhelmed team, or both. Outsourcing the work allows you to cover all your bases and emphasize those with the best results for you, while optimizing those that are struggling. You will receive more back from your investments, with less effort and stress on your team.

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Quick News of the Week – May 2, 2014

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With the constant stream of news coming out of the online marketing industry, it can be hard to keep up with all the latest updates without missing some important information. That’s why we compile all the news you may have missed this week all in one convenient place every Friday. Let’s get started:

Google Updates Guidelines Regarding Redirects

Google has had a policy against redirects intended to deceive or manipulate search engines or users, but this week they updated their Webmaster Guidelines to explicitly include mobile-specific redirects. They also include an example of a deceptive mobile redirect with a scenario where “desktop users might receive a normal page, while hackers might redirect all mobile users to a completely different spam domain.” Google details the revisions in an announcement on their Webmaster Central Blog.

Google Wants To Help You Remember Where You Parked

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According to Android Authority, Google’s latest update to the Android version of the Google Search App includes a new feature which can help users remember where they parked their car and even give directions on how to get back to that spot. For users parking at large venues, malls, or in heavily-populated areas, this could potentially be a lifesaver. The parking reminder works by asking if you want to save a location as a Google Now card. Then when you are ready to get back to your car, you just tap on the card in the app and directions will appear.

Search Ads Get More Revenue per Conversion When Integrated With Social

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Online marketing is quickly reaching the point where you can’t approach it in a vacuum and hope for success. The days of keeping SEO, PPC, and social media marketing apart are fading fast, if they aren’t completely gone already. A new study from Marin Software confirms this y showing that advertising performs vastly better when integrated with a social advertising strategy. Jessica Lee breaks down the details of the study at Search Engine Watch, but you can also get the full white paper here.

YouTube Now Lets Channel Owners Attach Short Intros To Their Videos

This week, YouTube announced that channel owners can now add a three-second intro to their videos, allowing them to build a stronger and more cohesive brand presence across the video platform. Channel owners must upload the intro as an unlisted video, then click “Add a channel branding intro” on the InVideo Programming page. At that point, channel owners can select which videos should include the intro. However, YouTube has said intros can not be used as ads, sponsorship, or product placements, and should not be used by channels whose videos act as advertisements.

Twitter Earns 14 Million Monthly Active Users in Q1 of 2014

Twitter’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2014 shows they continue to grow in just about every area, even outperforming Wall Street estimates in all but one area. The area in which they have continued to struggle is gaining monthly active users, but even there Twitter is showing very positive signs. While not beating Wall Street estimates, Twitter monthly users did grow by 14 million since Q4 2013, culminating in 255 million total users. This is substantially more growth than shown n Q4 2013.

Vine is Coming To Desktop With New Features

Vine

Up until now, Vine has been confined to smartphones, but this week the social video platform has made the leap to desktop with a well laid-out website and some new features. The new features include top navigation in the left which includes the home feed and popular now feed, and all feeds can now be linked together in TV mode. The biggest addition however is the new search bar that lets users search by tag, person, or location for the first time. You can get more details in the announcement on Vine’s blog, or you can see the new site for yourself here.

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Are the Recent Claims of Fraud Within Google AdSense a Lie?

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asLast night, an anonymous person claiming to have worked for the Google AdSense department “for several years” posted a statement titled “Google AdSense Leak” on Pastebin which supposedly details a standardized practice of fraud within Google.

The full document is a bit all over the place and unclear in many parts, but the allegations can be broken down to a few key points. According to the anonymous accusations, Google experienced financial issues in 2009 and the AdSense team was told to “tighten the belts” as Google was having to pay too many publishers too much money. To curtail this, the department put a secret initiative into effect that would ban publishers making more than $5,000 per month from AdSense, beginning in March 2009.

The practice becomes especially shady as the supposed Google employee states “We were told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period… The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to Google AdSense while having already served up the ads to the public.”

The accuser also says they were told the reasons for these practices was that “it was need for the company, and most of these publishers were ripping Google off anyways, and their gravy train needed to end.” Employees who disagreed over the practices were supposedly reprimanded and ridiculed for not being team players, and a small number allegedly resigned right then.

From there, the statement claims that Google wanted to further automate the process, so it set up the “AdSense Quality Control Color Codes” system intended to identify lucrative publishers to ban, while protecting larger corporations or publishers who were likely to create bad press.

The claim says some publishers were even aware of the system and took advantage by “Click-Bombing” their competitors. “Click-Bombing” is supposedly a practice where publishers would repeatedly over-click their competitors’ ads to get them flagged and banned by Google’s fraud detection service.

If true, these accusations could do significant damage to Google and expose a company culture of corruption. However, numerous analysts have found red flags all throughout the text indicating it is a farce. TechCrunch has a pretty thorough take down of the claims. Most importantly, it doesn’t appear the creator of the document ever worked for Google, at least within the “AdSense division”. For one, there is no formal “Google AdSense division” and a Google employee would more likely refer to it by the official internal title “Online Sales and Operations”.

The writer also seems to be unaware of Google’s extensive company culture. He refers to “being a team player”, but several have noted that actual employees call that “being Googley”. There are countless other discrepancies throughout the document, mostly relating to using terms that those inside Google would not, but there are also issues with the writer’s understanding of AdSense policies and internal functionality.

The biggest problem is more than vocabulary inconsistencies and wrong information. As repeatedly pointed out by pretty much everyone who has read the article, the biggest issue is the flawed belief at the core of these supposed policies. While this strategy could potentially save Google significant money in the short term, it would absolutely destroy their long-term platform viability. Google works with more than 2 million publishers and paid out several billion dollars to publishers and advertisers last year. Why risk a lucrative advertising platform’s future for a short term (relatively small) savings?

Of course, Matt Cutts has also issued a statement via Twitter calling the claims B.S. and Google has issued formal statements indicating the claims are false.

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Quick News of the Week – April 25, 2014

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With the constant stream of news coming out of the online marketing industry, it can be hard to keep up with all the latest updates without missing some important information. Below, we will go through all of the news from the week that we missed at the time.

Bing Tries To Predict The Winners of Your Favorite Reality Shows

Bing Predictions

Bing is using search and social signals in their attempt to predict outcomes of public events, and they are showcasing the results of their test by estimating who will be moving onto further rounds in reality shows like The Voice, American Idol, and Dancing With the Stars. Bing isn’t using magic to see the future, but they are using measures of popularity to predict the results of some of the most popular shows in the country. While this could be a fun feature for fans of reality TV, there is also potential for Bing to expand their predictions to events and elections that have a more direct on the country in the future.

Google Lets You Subscribe to Trending Search Topics

Google Subscribe

Google Trends has been a useful tool for discovering what people are searching for around the world. But, the service has always been somewhat isolated. You can consult the section to see what new artists, films, or memes are trending, but users have been left to keep up with the topics that interested them on their own. Now, Google Trends has added a new feature that lets you “Subscribe” to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart. Google explains how subscribing functions in their announcement.

New Features are Headed to AdWords

AdWords Update

Last week, Search Engine Land teased that huge news was coming for AdWords by vaguely discussing what types of features you might be seeing in the future. All the features were announced on Tuesday and Larry Kim took the time to break down what each new feature does and how it can affect online advertisers. Find out what the new AdWords will be like in Kim’s article for Search Engine Journal.

More Than Half of Responsive Mobile Sites Have “Unacceptable” Load Times

Responsive design has been widely loved for its ability to unify user experience across multiple platforms and devices, and some web designers claim it even speeds up their work process by preventing them from having to design two separate sites. However, a new study suggests responsive design may have a significant weakness. Responsive design may provide a better and more cohesive user experience across platforms, but a new study says the majority of responsive sites load too slowly for mobile users who are likely to leave a page that doesn’t load within 5 seconds. Mobile web developer Trilibis evaluated 155 prominent responsive design websites, and their findings aren’t pretty.

Yahoo Tests A Google Knowledge Graph Doppelganger in Search Results

There are rumors swirling that Yahoo is considering rejuvenating their search engine to re-challenge Bing for the second most-popular search engine available. Their share of the search market suggests Yahoo will have to make some drastic changes to have any chance at their comeback in the search game, but the company has been testing some recent changes to their search engine that lend truth to the rumors. However, one of their tests also drew attention for looking questionably similar to Google’s Knowledge Graph. All Google Testing discovered the test and documented how to see the test for yourself, or you can just watch their video below.

http://youtu.be/Pc254gEZx_Q

 

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Tearing Down SEO Myths With Matt Cutts

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For an industry that relies on as much data as the SEO market does, there is never much certainty that the popular optimization tactic being preached at the moment is a legitimate strategy. We rarely have the definitive answers from the source needed to keep all the confusion down, and new myths seem to spring up overnight.

To counter the constant flow of SEO myths, Google’s distinguished engineer Matt Cutts used one of his recent Webmaster Help videos to debunk many of the misconceptions surrounding the world’s most popular search engine.

This isn’t the first time Cutts has used his regular video message to debunk SEO myths, but this time he focuses on a specific type of myth that has become increasingly widespread as Google seems to keep narrowing their guidelines and offering greater space to ads.

Cutts starts by tackling the myth “if you buy ads you’ll rank higher in Google” and the opposing legend that not buying ads is the key to high rankings. In Matt Cutts’ perspective, these fables are tied to the notion that Google makes all of their decisions in an effort to force webmasters to buy more ads.

The problem with that idea is that it doesn’t actually reflect how Google thinks about their operations. The fact is, webmasters are rarely the main priority for the search engine to begin with. Instead, according to Cutts, Google’s rationale behind all changes is simply that they want to return the best search results possible to keep users happy and keep them coming back.

Of course, no one is denying that Google would like users to see ads and generate revenue, but that is never the prime motivation for changes like algorithm updates.

On a similar note, Matt uses the second half of the video to discuss the offers he sees for software packages that clam to help users make money and magically fix their SEO – for a small fee, of course.

Just as you can’t buy your way to high rankings with ads the chances of a random purchased software package making you money is almost zero. Matt lays out another scenario: “If someone had a foolproof way to make money online, they would probably use that way to make money rather than packaging it up in an ebook and selling it to people.”

In the end, most of the myths are born out of a misunderstanding of Google’s goals. Too many SEO professionals think of their job strictly in terms of increasing visibility and rankings, or upping their ROI. But the search engines are just looking for the best content possible. You can spend your time trying to game and cheat to get to the top, or you can align yourself with the search engine and try to provide users something of value. According to Cutts, that should be enough to fix many of the problems less honest SEOs tend to run into.

You can watch the full video below:

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Google and Search Engine Land Tease Big AdWords Announcement

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googleadwordsGoogle has been hinting that AdWords is up for a major overhaul, with tons of new features and tools. They have recently announced the big AdWords presentation will occur on April 22, as Jerry Dischler, VP of Product Management for AdWords speaks during a customer event. However, very few have been told what is going to be launched.

The only people with any idea of what is going to be unveiled later this month are Google and Search Engine Land, who got an exclusive early look at some of what is coming. Since Google obviously isn’t telling, your best chance of finding out before the April 22 event is to head over to Search Engine Land, where they are teasing all of the upcoming announcements.

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Understanding Consumer Behavior Online and Off

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Getting online is only half of the battle to actually expanding your brand via the internet. Once your website and profiles are all set up, you have to start leveraging them to interest and excite your audience. The only way to do this is by actually understand who you are trying to connect with and their habits.

A new study recently released by retail engagement firm Parago offers just that type of insight, as it explores how consumers research and buy across several product categories. The entire report can help you more deeply understand how people buy online and in-person.

Nathan Safran from Search Engine Land also took the study even further, by putting a magnifying glass onto the portion of the study that examined consumer behavior once the buyer is already in purchase mode.

There is a ton to be gained from the full report, and Safran’s work takes it a step further. The findings also break many of the misconceptions held by online marketers, especially when it comes to social media’s role in purchasing.

The graphic below breaks down where people prefer to look for certain types of goods, but it is just the tip of the iceberg contained in Parago’s report.

Source: Paradago

Source: Parago

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The Comprehensive Social Video Infographic

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Online video has reached a new level of importance in our lives over the past few years. YouTube is still the dominant service for free online video hosting and sharing, but several other platforms have taken YouTube’s lead and expanded on it in numerous ways.

Instagram and Vine have imposed limits on their video lengths to make them as sharable as possible, while Vimeo has focused its efforts on hosting primarily high-quality and visually stunning videos instead of the shaky cell-phone footage so prevalent on YouTube.

The question remains, which services do you invest your energy and resources into? If you are hoping to use the social video site to increase your brand’s visibility, you want to tailor the content you are creating to the platform most suited to your demographic.
You can get a complete breakdown of all of the major services in the infographic below.

The graphic was created by Russel Cooke, and explains what makes each service unique, as well as how each could benefit a business. If you know your market, you should be able to identify which service is most likely to connect you with your audience. From there, it’s just a matter of making content that will excite them.

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Selling Links? You Probably Shouldn’t Be Tweeting About It

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Late last week the SEO community had a good laugh at the expense of a self-proclaimed SEO expert who openly tweeted at major brands about renewing link buys. It appears the links were initially bought through iAcquire shortly before the service was penalized for participating in link buying schemes, and now that they are expiring, a former client is attempting to reach out directly to the link buyers.

The conversation that caught the eye of the SEO community was a long and outright discussion between “Vince” (@VitaliyKolosWDL) and T-Mobile. Search Engine Roundtable managed to screenshot the entire conversation before T-Mobile wisely began deleting their responses. Interestingly, “Vince” hasn’t deleted any of his tweets despite openly talking about selling links and even linking to the page being used to sell links.

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Obviously, if the SEO media noticed the conversation, it didn’t take it long to reach Matt Cutts from Google, who probably summed up the situation in the shortest way possible:

Cutts wasn’t the only member of the webspam team to notice, either. Brian White also tweeted at “Vince” with a mocking photo of himself using an Android cookie jar like a phone.

While the person tweeting to companies hasn’t deleted anything, it does appear their website has been penalized already. It took five days since the first tweets started to appear, but unsurprisingly Web Design Library has tumbled down the search results. Search Engine Watch says the site was appearing on the 8th page on a search for [web design] on Monday, but come Tuesday the site didn’t pop up until the 48th page of results.

If you haven’t gotten the notice that selling links can get you in trouble, take this opportunity to look up the numerous other sites that have learned the hard way. Google is treating both those who buy and sell links harshly, and they show no sign of stopping. If “Vince” was as educated in SEO as he claimed, he would have already known this and he definitely wouldn’t have been using an open forum like Twitter to talk about it.

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